1634: The Ram Rebellion

by Eric Flint

  More and more, these days, Matt had a bad taste in his mouth.

  Kronach, August 1633

  Carl Neustetter did not know where the plague had come from. It had started the month before. Plague, certainly. Over a hundred people had died, already. If the observers outside the walls were keeping track, they should be counting the funerals.

  It certainly did not help that there was no place to bury the dead except inside the walls.

  Unless, of course, they wanted to open the gates.

  The besiegers had offered a parley. They had not, naturally enough, offered to allow the city to send out its dead for burial. Or to allow the living to leave. The standard way to handle plague was to quarantine it as far as possible.

  Neustetter wanted to open the gates. Wolf Philip von Dornheim did not. But, then, he was no longer the bishop’s relative. The bishop was dead in his exile. Neustetter had not received any news by way of a human being for nearly three months, but he had always kept a loft of carrier pigeons, as did one of his old friends in Bamberg.

  So Dornheim could not veto. It would come down to de Melon. To surrender now, while possibly most of the city’s people could be saved by the up-timers’ possibly legendary medicines. Or to open the gates after they were dead.

  Plague was plague. A fact of life. De Melon was not anxious to open the gates. Not yet.

  Kronach, September 1633

  Stewart Hawker came up himself, to tell Matt the news about how the Bamberg city council had ordered the flogging of Wilbur Thornton and Johnnie F. And the rest of it.

  It wasn’t Matt’s fault. He had to be told that that. Vince Marcantonio agreed. Matt was having a hard time of it, watching people die inside Kronach. Cliff Priest hadn’t given him the easiest job going, this year. How did the folks back in Grantville expect him to do the Special Commission on Religious Freedom work on top of it?

  Well, he’d tried. Both of them had, in a way, working with the Catholics and Protestants up here in the north. But up here in the north wasn’t Bamberg city, and nobody could be in two places at once.

  Vince and Cliff needed Matt here.

  * * *

  “You know, Stew,” Matt Trelli said. “I just wish that I could figure out the hat colors.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Like in westerns. The good guys always wore the white hats. The bad guys always wore the black hats. These guys . . .” He shook his head.

  Stew nodded.

  What really hurt was that in a lot of ways, the people forted up in Kronach were the kind that a West Virginian would want to admire. Even if they were subjects of a prince-bishop, they were at least commoners. Tradesmen and workers, mostly; that was how they made their livings. They’d had a shooting club for nearly two centuries, already, in the town. The citizens were armed. Those were good things. Grantvillers knew in their bones that they were good things.

  And, in a lot of ways, their opponents were the kind of people a West Virginian would want to loathe. Noblemen. Petty rulers who extracted the last penny out of the peasants who were their subjects.

  “I think,” Matt said, finally “that maybe the right words are ‘tormented and afflicted.’ For what they do to each other, I mean. The words are in a lot of hymns.”

  Who’s Calling This Race?

  Virginia DeMarce

  April 1633: Würzburg, Franconia

  Anita Masaniello—who had kept her maiden name when she married and had some decidedly feminist views otherwise, as well—looked at the group gathered around the conference table. A Grantville girl in origin, she had worked in the Baltimore county public library system before the Ring of Fire; she and her family had been caught up in it because they were attending her parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary party that Sunday afternoon. In Würzburg, she was in charge of figuring out the land tenure system.

  Steve Salatto, her husband, was not a happy camper. “Is this religious freedom commission on top of us, under us, or flying somewhere out at a lateral? Just when we were, sort of, starting to figure out what we’re doing.”

  Anita wasn’t surprised at his grumpy tone. Her husband had been appointed “Chief NUS Administrator for Franconia” in overall charge of the administration of Franconia, right after the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had turned it over to the New United States in the fall of 1632. They had come to Würzburg scarcely a month later, that October, six months ago now. Despite being a bureaucrat by training and background, Steve wasn’t much given to petty fussiness and turf wars. Still, no administrator likes to discover that he’s been saddled with a “special commission” which stands outside of the clearly delineated chain of command.

  “Lateral, I think,” Scott Blackwell said. “But we’ll end up having our feet held to the fire for whatever they do.”

  If Scott Blackwell had a family motto, Anita thought, it would have been: cynicism is the best alternative. Several months as the chief NUS military administrator in Franconia hadn’t helped his mood.

  “Who’s coming?” That question came from David Petrini, the economic liaison. Most of the Franconian cities didn’t have an economic liaison, but in so far as Grantville had been able to muster a cadre of high-powered administrators, it had blessed Würzburg with them.

  Steve Salatto grimaced. “Well, we—Würzburg, that is—are being endowed with three would-be but not-yet-quite-hatched lawyers, a legal clerk and three security guys. Specifically, for the commission members: Reece Ellis, Paul Calagna, and Phil Longhi. With Jon Villareal as clerk. And Lowry Eckerlin, Jim Genucci, and Hugh McAndrew for security.”

  “Oh,” Petrini said. “Joy.”

  “Hey, wait. Those three security guys have decent MP training. Them we can use.” Scott’s mood had actually brightened a little. “If only they would send us some staff . . .”

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “Really, I could use all four of the guys that they’re sending to be this commission. If, of course, Congress had been so kind as to appropriate enough money into our budget that Mike could have sent them to work for me. But, at least, they’re sending them. For Bamberg, they’re just piling the commission function on top of what Walt Miller and Matt Trelli are already doing. In Fulda, Mark Early gets the job and they’re sending Joel Matowski out from Grantville to help him, as soon as they can get him detached from what he’s doing now.”

  “Joel Matowski is what? Twenty-four years old?”

  “Can it, David,” Anita said. “All of us were twenty-four, once upon a time. People can’t help it. But—why Reece Ellis?”

  They all looked at one another.

  It was a good question. The sections of Franconia that Gustavus Adolphus had assigned to Grantville for administrative purposes were almost entirely Catholic. Somehow, most of the administrators sent there by Grantville had turned out to be Catholic, with just a large enough salting of Protestants to indicate that these assignments were not entirely based on religion.

  There had been a vague hope that sending Catholics would be a conciliatory gesture, perhaps. Or that it would make more of an impression upon the residents of Franconia if the news about changes in the wind was brought to them by their fellow-religionists. Or . . . Who knew? In any case, Anita thought, most of the people sitting around the table had known one another for a long time at St. Mary’s. The people in the commission seem to follow pretty much the same pattern. Except for Reece.

  Scott Blackwell wasn’t Catholic, true, but he had recently gotten engaged to a down-time woman who was. Steve’s deputy, Saunders Wendell, was Presbyterian—but his wife Jessica was Catholic. Saunders was not in the meeting because he was out arbitrating a dispute between two claimants to a mill pond. The stream of water in question formed the boundary between two Aemter. The Amtmann, the local administrator, in each of them had issued a decision that favored the man from his own district; the dispute had been appealed to higher authority. Saunders, armed with a sheaf of paper from Anita’s down-time clerks that laid out the course of
the claims for the past three generations, had set out in the sure knowledge that no matter what he decided, at least half of the people involved would be unhappy and resentful at the end of it.

  Reece Ellis. Well, aaah. He’d married Anne Marie Robinson, who was a member of the parish. No one knew quite why, except for the obvious, of course. For Anne Marie, the Rite of Holy Matrimony was also the Only Path to Sex. Anita sometimes wondered whether Anne Marie ever regretted having walked down that path with Reece, but if so, she had never admitted it.

  Reece hadn’t converted. He took outspoken pride in not having converted. He seemed to mention at every opportunity that he hadn’t converted.

  Why Reece? Why to Franconia?

  “Maybe,” Scott suggested, “they’ve run out of baby lawyers.”

  It seemed as good an explanation as any. The morning staff meeting moved on to the next agenda item.

  * * *

  “You what?” Reece Ellis asked Johnnie F. “You fucking what?”

  Johnnie F., more formally named John Frederic Haun, had come down to Würzburg the previous fall with the first set of military administrators that Grantville sent. It had rapidly dawned upon Steve Salatto and Scott Blackwell that all was not rosy in Franconia. A significant proportion of its inhabitants loathed the king of Sweden, did not appreciate that he had assigned them to be governed by a batch of foreigners and Thuringians (which amounted to the same thing, in their eyes) who were almost all heretics to boot, and considered that, in general, they had been perfectly happy in their “loved Egyptian night.” So Johnnie F. had been appointed to head a “hearts and minds” program. At which point, he had brought his wife Tania and their adopted Korean son, Dakota, to Würzburg. They had moved into a comfortable down-time house, with no more in the way of twentieth-century amenities than that of any other master craftsman or minor bureaucrat in the city of Würzburg.

  “I joined the Catholic church,” Johnnie f. repeated.

  “We are damn well supposed to be here establishing religious freedom. Not caving in to what these guys believe.”

  “Religious freedom includes joining the Catholic Church,” Johnnie F. pointed out cheerfully. “Now, I admit we mainly did it at first to make it easier to adopt those kids. Tania just fell in love with all four of them at the orphanage where she was volunteering, and it’s run by nuns. But it’s done more for getting the people down here with the program than anything else I could have done. I didn’t expect that, really. But here I am. Trophy convert in person. Hauled out of a variety of heresy that hadn’t even been invented in this day and age into the light of True Faith. Nobody around here is impressed by the fact that Steve or David is Catholic. For heavens sake, they all expect Italians to be Catholic. There’s nothing exciting about it; dog bites man rather than man bites dog and all that; it would only be interesting if one of them wasn’t. But me, I’m on show at all public occasions. Which almost always gives me a chance to say how well it worked the American way. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, I always say.”

  Johnnie F. sauntered off. He wished the commissioners well, but he had his own agenda. That, for today, involved vermin control in stored grain and the 78th re-run of his elementary school program. He was also arranging to import alfalfa seed from southern Italy. He’d have done that already if it hadn’t taken him six months just to find out that in this day and age the English word for it, or some close relative of it, was lucerne. Once he figured that out, finding the German and Italian words for it had been a snap, so to speak.

  When Johnnie F. looked back on his military service since the Ring of Fire, he admitted to himself that he’d made a pretty poor soldier. Not that he hadn’t tried. He still did, but he just couldn’t seem to get focused on destroying large chunks of men and materiel. He made a pretty good agricultural extension agent, though, now that he had the chance. Weird that he’d had to end up in the army to get it. He’d always wanted to be one, but by the time he graduated, the state office was downsizing. His pre-Ring of Fire job in the Clarksburg office of a big timber firm had just been a way to use his degree in agriculture to earn a living not too far from home.

  He speeded up a bit once he was around the corner, trotting off to collect his helpers. He didn’t have time to fret about Reece Ellis.

  June 1633: Würzburg, Franconia

  The Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda certainly had accumulated a lot of paper. Paul Calagna looked around the storeroom with a certain amount of wonder.

  “Are we expected to cart all this home with us when we finish up?” he asked Phil Longhi.

  “I think so. The Federal Archivist’s Full Employment Act of 1633. That’s us.”

  “We’ve not even bought this much paper. I should know; I authorize the payment vouchers.”

  “What do we spend our days doing?” Phil asked. “Either going out and meeting with local authorities or calling local authorities in to meet with us here. What happens, either way? They give us a stack of paper, that’s what. Or, more precisely, they give Jon Villareal a stack of paper. Which he files. Here. Say, by the time we’re done, a ream of paper every work day for four or five months . . . That’s in addition to what we use ourselves.”

  “I guess I’d better plan to hire a wagon and team, then. One more item for our poor overstressed budget.”

  July 1633: Bamberg, Franconia

  By July, the commissioners in Würzburg were to the point that they could check up on what was happening in the other parts of Franconia. Phil and Jon held the fort; Paul went up to Fulda; Lowry, Jim, and Hugh went off with three of Scott Blackwell’s men to the little enclave of a pugnacious Imperial Knight. The knight’s enclave was entirely surrounded by Würzburg, but for all of a half-mile was itself located on both sides of one of the main roads from here to there. They hoped he would see reason on the topic of transit tolls.

  Reece Ellis, meanwhile, went to Bamberg. Where, belligerent as usual, he decided that the local commissioners just weren’t up to snuff. Instead of making the commission work their first priority, Walt and Matt had continued to do their regular assignments first. They’d disseminated information on the Establishment of Religious Freedom only as an afterthought and during those small portions of the day when they weren’t thinking about their main jobs with the military. Vince Marcantonio, the NUS administrator, and the rest of the civilian staff hadn’t paid much attention to the project either. They’d somehow gotten the impression, when two army men were assigned to do it, that this was a military initiative. They had continued to think about tax revenues, public sanitation, and the like.

  Reece had to admit that Bennett Norris had picked up the voter registration part of it and was carrying that through, but that was only a postscript to the Special Commission’s real job, as far as he was concerned.

  If Reece had only expressed his opinion to Walt and Matt, or to Cliff Priest, who was the military administrator and their boss, or even to Vince and to his deputy Wade Jackson, he wouldn’t have done that much damage. It would have been, after all, only among the up-timers. But Reece expressed it in public. He expressed it during a formal speech to the Bamberg city council. He expressed his strong conviction that Bamberg’s delegation from the Special Commission didn’t really give a damn about the establishment of religious freedom to anyone else who might be listening. He made his view very plain—that, in fact, the special commissioners were boot-lickers for Vince Marcantonio, who would let the Bamberg Catholics get away with anything they tried.

  Any number of the residents of Bamberg filed this interesting datum away for future consideration.

  Early August, 1633: Würzburg, Franconia

  “So where do we stand?” Arnold Bellamy asked. The reports he had been receiving from Franconia had disturbed him enough that he had climbed on a horse and come down to take a look in person. “Who’s calling this race?”

  “Paul is,” Steve Sala
tto answered immediately. Anything to head off Reece Ellis.

  “Well, then,” Paul Calagna said. “If it’s a race, overall, I think, thanks to Tania and Johnnie F., who adopted four children from the local orphanage, not to mention Joseph Matewski, who is volunteering at the hospitals when he isn’t bandaging up our own people, showing the ladies new ways to cope with cradle cap and other infant ills, motherhood and apple pie appear to be considerably ahead of the rest of the Special Commission’s horses. Apple Pie has found a down-time business partner in Zwetschgenkuechen and the two of them are showing up together on the bakery shelves. Those damson tarts are yummy.”

  “Be serious, blast it!” Reece snorted.

  “I am serious,” Paul protested. “Motherhood and Apple Pie are far in the lead. Voter Registration is running a strong third, though. Let’s get Dave Stannard’s input on that part of it.”

  Stannard was the inspector of elections for all of Franconia. Of all Grantville’s regular rather than special staff, he was probably happiest with what the commission had been doing.

  “Yes, it’s been going great,” he said. “This is one thing that the down-time district administrators understand. If you tell these Amtmaenner and their staffs to go out and make a list of all people in their district who are eighteen and over, arranged by town and village Gemeinde, they will by golly march out and make a list of all people in their district aged eighteen and over arranged by town and village. Pretty promptly and pretty thoroughly, too. If you tell them to contact each of those people, male and female, read them a page about the responsibility of voters under the NUS constitution, and register them to vote—at least for the election to decide whether or not their jurisdiction is going to join us; we can’t do much about the qualifications for voting in local elections at the moment—the Amtmaenner will do that, too. These guys are really, really, good with lists. They send us tax assessment lists; lists of how many draft animals each village has; lists of who owes rents and dues to whom. Believe me; these guys have lists down pat.”